There was one subject, and one subject alone, on which every villain and
crimefighter in Gotham agreed: a laughing fit after a Joker encounter is
cause for concern. No matter how casual and frivolous the meeting may
have seemed at the time, if you found yourself chortling later, you got
yourself to a hospital for a blood test. And if your neuroendocrine
levels were up, immunoglobulin was activated, or respiration was irregular,
then you swallowed your pride and swallowed whatever substance Batman had
given that hospital as the latest antidote for the latest Joker toxin.

Even Selina, if she had found herself laughing for no reason after, say,
a night at the Iceberg when Joker had been present, would have taken the
necessary precautions. But she was not laughing for no reason.
She was laughing—and she tried to explain this to Bruce as he dragged her
out of bed intent on getting her down to the Batcave for treatment—she tried
to explain—ahem, tried to explain that she was laughing for a damn
good reason: Joker—

That was as far as she got before it started up again. Laughter.
But not SmileX laughter; funny laughter. Laughter at a perfectly
ludicrous realization after an especially tense week. By the time she
could breathe, Bruce had her wrapped in his kimono and halfway down the
manor stairs. She calmed herself and tried again: Joker and—

She giggled anew, and by the time she caught her breath again, they were
in the study and Bruce was setting her down in order to open the grandfather
clock.

“Really, it’s okay,” she managed, realizing that the way to maintain her
composure was to assure him without trying to explain what was so funny.
Trying to explain the thought that set her off would only get her going
again.

“Come on,” he growled as the passageway opened. “It seems like you’re
able to walk now.”

He was obviously still determined to subject her to a battery of tests.
Selina knew it was pointless to object, so she followed, but she did try
once more to explain once they’d reached the med lab. She got as far
as “Seriously, I’m fine,” when she was stopped by the look in his eye.
He seemed… shaken. And she could imagine why.

After capturing Joker at the Wayne Tower, they’d split up: he to take the
madman to Arkham, she to do whatever it was she did on those “prowls” of
hers, which he still wasn’t quite clear on. She’d beaten him home, as
always. After depositing Joker at Arkham, he’d returned to the city
and patrolled for another three hours or so. The logs took twenty minutes,
changing another ten, so it was nearly five o’clock by the time Bruce
reached the bedroom door. So he wasn’t at all surprised that she’d
beaten him home. He was surprised that she was still awake.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he’d asked, untying the belt of his kimono.

“No, it was a choice,” she answered, pulling at the belt like a kitten.
“It seems like we haven’t had much contact beyond ‘Morning Handsome-Grunt’
since this whole party thing was announced. So I figured I’d stay up
and, I don’t know, purr in your ear or something when you got home.”

He sank into the bed, muttering wearily about having to revive a flawed
protocol because of more serious flaws in the circumstances… Then he
closed his eyes, and rubbed temples.

Selina was about to observe that he’d been pushing himself too hard, but
it seemed like he was already falling asleep. So she postponed the
chitchat, turned off the light, and settled into her favorite spot under his
arm. She placed her hand on his chest, just over the scar of an
ancient cat-scratch, and realized what it was about the night’s events that
had her so unsettled. It was a throwback to what their
relationship had been for so many years: days or weeks of fruitless
anticipation, hoping and near misses—then a sudden, unexpected tussle of
unbelievable intensity. A few short minutes, sometimes, to last… who
knew? A week, a month, maybe more…

And now? Now Joker ranted about “giving the bride away.” Gladys
Ashton-Larraby dropped hints to the society gossip columns. Superman found
some way, once a month or so, to remind them both that…

And that’s when she started laughing.

Superman.

Joker, Superman, and Gladys Ashton-Larraby.

Bruce woke, concerned, and called her name sharply, but she couldn’t
squelch the laughter long enough to answer coherently.

Joker, Superman and Gladys Ashton-Larraby. Joker, Superman, and
Gladys Ashton-Larraby all had opinions about her marital status?
Joker, Superman, and Gladys Ashton-Larraby all had opinions about her
uterus! Joker, Superman, and Gladys Ashton-Larraby! That was
just funny.

Insane and dangerous. Jervis Tetch felt he’d never been in quite so
much peril since this woman at a tabloid newspaper declared him insane and
dangerous.

Before, Jonathan Crane—who everyone knew was truly a psychotic
menace of epic proportions—was taking too much of an interest in Jervis’s
private affairs. Then he assumed that mousy little Jervis was
being victimized by Edward Nigma, intellectual bully. But now,
now Nigma was missing and this lunatic reporter was telling everyone that
he, Jervis Tetch, lovable Jervis Tetch, was a dangerous lunatic. Now there
was no TELLING what Scarecrow might be thinking.

On the one hand, it could have been mere kindness. Anyone who had
passed out at the Iceberg knew that waking up in that backroom with a
stuffed emperor penguin wedged into an umbrella stand wasn’t the pleasantest
experience. Loosening his tie, taking off his hat, and patting his
forehead with a damp towel could have been mere kindness—except that
Jonathan Crane was a psychotic menace and not exactly known for his
kindness.

And since then, he’d been hanging about with this air of helpful concern
that made Jervis’s skin crawl.

Needing SOMETHING to keep Crane occupied, Jervis was doing his best to
keep him distracted with the mystery of the moment: The Strange
Disappearance of Edward Nigma. Neither of them were well-suited to
the task, being more inclined to fray and frazzle the detective mind rather
than operate one. But they had the Zagat Guide, and they knew Eddie.
They knew his happy knack for leaving clues, even when he didn’t mean to.
So they read the Zagat guide, poring over the ratings and descriptions of
each shop Eddie had circled “in his final moments” (as Jervis had taken to
referring to it, with increasingly melodramatic inflection).

“You keep twitching your fingers on certain words, making those air
quotes.”

“I am simply being precise, Jonathan,” he explained with a prissy
dignity, pointing to the book. “They take surveys from people who shop
at these places and string the best quotes together to make a descriptive
paragraph.”

Jonathan sighed.

“No wonder Nigma subscribes to it. What a frightful waste of time.”

“May I continue?” Jervis asked, his eyebrows arching to produce an almost
mask-like effect of curious anticipation.

Crane nodded. And Jervis scanned the page, moving his lips as he
read, until he found his place again.

“Old Gotham financial district shop,” he repeated. “’With a
mind-boggling selection that ranges from everyday to rarefied vintage models
to calligraphy pens with 14-karat gold nibs…’ Oh, this is nice, ‘As well as
excellent repair service—if it writes or used to, they can fix it.’ I
must say, that is handy. How I hate throwing away pens. Do you
know—”

Crane cleared his throat and glared, and Jervis decided not to pursue
that conversation after all.

“Presumably. Not mine. Theirs,” Jervis said, pointing again
to the page.

“Hm,” Scarecrow murmured disapprovingly. “Mind-boggling is
obviously significant,” he said. “Seeing as you were involved.”

Jervis bit his lip. That angle had not occurred to him. He
was too preoccupied with a new danger that he only just saw as he was
reading, a danger that seemed to rise from the words like a sleeping dragon:
the very nature of the shop was the PENS. And the greatest riddle of
all time, posed by the original Mad Hatter was: How is a raven like a
writing desk? Why, he and Eddie had argued about it many times.
And now, virtually Eddie’s last act before disappearing into the looking
glass was to send him to a place called the Fountain Pen Hospital.

Ordinarily, Jervis would have been delighted at this titillating notion.
It was certainly a deliciously clever Mad Hatter scheme that Riddler was
designing for him—but if Jonathan were to see this particular angle about
the raven and the writing desk, the consequences for Jervis could be
gruesome. How is a raven like a writing desk? Or possibly how is
Raven like a writing desk? Raven was Oswald’s comely hostess, a
pretty young woman whose scream when a spider appeared on her podium had
piqued Jonathan’s interest.

Jervis hoped Jonathan didn’t know his Alice in Wonderland that well, for
if he did make the connection and thought Raven was involved in his scheme…
It was true that ‘mind-boggling’ must certainly be a Mad Hatter reference,
and Jervis did not want Jonathan to start thinking Eddie’s plan—which he was
meant to think was Jervis’s plan—might involve his boggling lovely Raven’s
mind!

“Well, I think that’s it for the fountain pens,” he said abruptly.
“Let’s keep all that under our hats as we move on to the next one, shall
we?” Then he clapped his hands enthusiastically and turning the guide to
Habu Textiles…

The man with thinning hair and a loud green shirt emblazoned with bright
yellow question marks took his usual seat at Tavern on the Green.
Other than wedding receptions and Sunday brunches, true Gothamites did not
go to Tavern on the Green. During the week, the famous restaurant in
the heart of Robinson Park was patronized almost exclusively by tourists who
came in by the busload. As such, Eddie found he was far more invisible
here, dressed in this way, than he was living that miserable hermit’s
existence in which he’d spent his first days of self-imposed exile.

At first, he’d checked into a moderately priced bed-and-breakfast
patronized by low-key European visitors. He never left the building,
never even ventured into the communal dining room for the continental
breakfast included with his room. He had all of his food delivered
through the hotel’s strange convoluted practice: they provided local takeout
menus that could be ordered through, and delivered by, the hotel room
service. It reminded him of sucking up to Hugo Strange at Arkham when
Strange had access to takeout pizza and barbecue through a mercenary guard
named Saul Vics. That realization ruined Eddie’s appetite, and sitting
in the room with no diversions but the Gideon’s Bible and the television was
driving him stark raving mad. He was laying low to stay OUT of Arkham
until the party, but if he spent one more hour watching daytime television,
his great brain might be fit for nothing other than Arkham.

So he’d ventured out—and was stopped dead in his tracks in the lobby by a
family of four, all wearing “I heart Gotham City” t-shirts, each and every
one emblazoned with a large bat-emblem. He realized there were better
ways to hide than subsisting on delivered pizza, Szechuan, and sushi,
watching Jerry Springer, and never seeing the light of day. He could
hide in plain sight—as a tourist—whom Gothamites looked at constantly and
never really saw.

So he’d moved from the pleasant low-key bed-and-breakfast to the crassest
tourist hotel in Times Square. He bought the loud, green Riddler shirt
he was wearing at the gift shop in their lobby, and each day he attached
himself to one of the bus tours. He’d been to the top of the Empire
building and Rockefeller Center a dozen times now. He’d taken the CNN
tour at Time-Warner and seen the show at Radio City six times each.
He’d taken two river cruises around Gotham. He’d been to the Robinson
Park Zoo, Strawberry Fields and the Gotham Museum; he’d seen Les Miserables,
Mamma Mia and The Lion King. When his fellow bus-people asked
where he was from, he extolled the pleasures of Steubenville, Ohio.
When they asked what he did for a living, he said he was a regional rep for
a new candy called BALI ADDER MINT. They wandered off when he began
explaining how he went around from grocery store to grocery store,
negotiating prominent shelf placement for the BALI ADDER MINT.

It had all gone splendidly. Each day he was deposited at Tavern on
the Green for lunch, and he was amusing himself working through the
permutations of their three-course menu. He left, as always, saying
how he hoped the concierge could get him a ticket for Phantom of the Opera
tonight—when he was yanked off the sidewalk by a— green— cloying—
leafy— AAAHHHH!

It took the sting of Bruce taking a blood sample to pierce through the
layers of amusement and bursting tension, so Selina could finally,
rationally, explain what sparked her laughing fit:

“Joker, Superman, and Gladys Ashton-Larraby,” she recited as Bruce
checked her pupils and then her lips. “Joker, Superman, and Gladys
Ashton-Larraby. Tell me that’s not funny.”

“Maybe from where you sit,” he growled, swabbing her forearm with
disinfectant one last time before applying a Band-Aid.

“If you laugh at it here, just this once, while it’s just us, I’ll never
tell,” she said with a naughty grin.

He paused, considering it. Selina focused all her thoughts on the
side of his lip, and just when she was convinced it was ready to twitch, he
said, “I will never, in a thousand years, be able to predict what you’ll
find funny. I would have thought if anything would set off the hissing
and scratching—”

“Any one of them on their own, yeah, sure, I’d be sharpening my claws
now. But all three, Bruce, c’mon. There’s a critical mass
of ludicrous inanity. ‘Superman. Joker. And Gladys
Ashton-Larraby.’ I can’t take that seriously enough to get pissed, can
you?”

His eyes softened a bit, but his expression didn’t change.

“Still no twitch?” Selina prodded with a seductive trill.

“Do you have any idea the nightmare scenarios that ran through my head
coming down the stairs just now? If you’d been exposed to SmileX back
at the tower and I didn’t notice. I made an extra run through the park
after finishing patrol. I took twenty minutes on the logs, and all the
while you could’ve been… And what was it, an accidental exposure meant
for me, or intentional—what possible Joker rationale could there be for
striking at you that way? Was it a time-release drug, or did it need a
catalyst to activate—”

There were more speculations to come, but Selina silenced them with a
slow, insistent kiss.

“I’m fine,” she reassured him. “It was just a very, very tense
week.” She paused to take a very deep breath and then let it out.
“And once the bubble popped, it popped.”

She touched the side of his lip.

“Wouldn’t kill you to let it out now and then either. You’ve been a
lot tenser than I have the last 7 days.”

He nodded reluctantly.

“I used to make better choices where Joker is concerned. In the
early days, it was like it’s been this past week: I’d unearth every pebble
trying to find him, and wind up running on empty by the time the
confrontation actually occurred. So, over time, I learned it was in my
best interests to let him make the next move. It’s hard. You can
only hope that the move won’t involve killing an entire family
because they have a needlepoint welcome mat… Anyway, I know better than to
do what I’ve been doing. But with this party looming—like you said,
it’s a deadline. I had no choice.”

“And you got him,” Selina pronounced, satisfied. “So…” She
pointed, insistently, at the corner of his lip.

“It took longer than it should have. Time that could have been spent—”

“Going after every other crook in the city? Bruce, please.
Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, Huntress, and Pheromones are all on the case,
aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “So is Harvey. He’s got Hugo Strange out
of the picture. And Nightwing captured Killer Croc.”

Selina smirked.

“Dick may not fully comprehend the priorities of this mission,” she
observed.

“Obviously he wouldn’t pass up a chance to apprehend Croc,” Bruce
graveled.

“I’m sure. I just don’t think he was much of a threat as far as the
glitzy society fundraiser is concerned,” Selina demurred. Then her
eyes flickered with a determined feline glint, and she focused all her
attention on that stubborn corner of the bat-lip as she said “Besides, I
never have any trouble with Waylon since I showed him a picture of his head
photoshopped onto a green crocodile Kelly bag.”

She followed this with the naughtiest grin seen since the Winthrop
Rubies, and was rewarded, after an additional four seconds of stone-faced
silence, with the coveted lip-twitch.

The Mad Hatter was not the only rogue who had noticed the Riddler’s
disappearance. He and Scarecrow were not the only rogues who wondered
what could have happened to him. Poison Ivy had also noticed when
Nigma vanished so mysteriously—indeed, she noticed almost as soon as Jervis
discovered it, and long before he’d gone shooting his mouth all over the
Iceberg about it. She didn’t care enough to go looking for him, but
she did miss having someone to talk to. Why, she hadn’t even told him
about her scrapbook.

So Ivy had instructed her plants to keep watch for him and report back.
When he was spotted coming into the park, an alert zinnia reported back to
her and she dispatched two of her most efficient minions, a flytrap and a
creepervine, to bring him to her.

She waited, patiently, for him to wake, for it seemed the creeper—used to
Batman, who wore a protective cowl—had let Nigma’s head bounce on the stairs
as they descended into her lair.

She waited patiently for as long as she could, then she had the creeper
fetch some water and throw it in his face. That brought him around
much faster and she was sorry she didn’t think of it sooner.

She explained, briefly, that the creeper was inexperienced with uncowled,
unhelmeted heads, and that she’d meant no harm. Nigma merely glared at
her as he rubbed the throbbing soreness that ran from the back of his neck
up to his left ear. It was a look she knew well, like he wanted to
tell her off but knew he wouldn’t get far before the pheromones kicked in.
He said he “accepted her apology,” although he said it the way you told Dr.
Bartholomew that you were completely rehabilitated and sure you could become
a productive member of society.

Ivy had not ‘apologized,’ and would have said so—but she felt they
were getting off to a very bad start, and she would never get any answers if
they didn’t get past the preliminaries. So she let it go—for now.

For his part, Eddie was… uneasy. It wasn’t that he’d been kidnapped
and manhandled by foliage. That had happened before and it would
happen again. It went with life in Gotham. What concerned him
was Ivy herself. The more she talked, the more believable her story
seemed. She really hadn’t meant for the plants to rough him up.
She wanted to talk.

She’d only been calling him first thing in the morning for weeks
before he’d disappeared. It made sense. She wanted to talk—and
talk and talk and talk—about herself, about her press. It was pure
Ivy. It was totally believable.

She noticed when he disappeared—also believable, since she was calling
him every day.

She wondered what had happened to him—also believable. It wasn’t
any great concern for his welfare, she missed her audience. She was a
needy, lonely wreck, and she wanted to talk and there was nobody but the
flowerbeds to listen to her.

Yes, it all made sense. So when her plants found him (Why oh why
didn’t he anticipate that danger, Tavern on the Green was in the heart of
Robinson Park—but how was he to know Ivy was looking for him?), she had them
bring him to her.

And now, now she had him. She wanted to know WHY he’d gone.
What did he know that they didn’t?

And wasn’t that a loaded question.

“Habu Textiles,” Jervis read. “For an amazing selection of
wonderful Japanese yarns and fabrics you will find nowhere else (made from
such substances as pineapple, bamboo, stainless-steel-and-silk combo),
artists and fashionistas come to this Chelsea textile specialist which also
houses a weaving studio and gallery; the ‘minimalist’ space displays
one-of-a-kind hand-dyed pieces for garments or home furnishings that are
also fabu as artworks in their own right.”

“Fabu?” Jonathan Crane asked archly.

Jervis merely shrugged and pointed again to the Zagat guide as if to say
it wasn’t his fault.

“Not even a good anagram,” Crane observed.

Again Jervis shrugged.

Jonathan rubbed his chin thoughtfully… ‘Minimalist’ made him think of all
the shrinking Alice did… Eat Me. Drink Me. Mushrooms… He
glanced warily at the table where Jervis had fixed them a snack a few hours
before…

Then he looked suspiciously at Jervis.

…there were little cakes too.

Eddie was no fool. Poison Ivy had questions. If he didn’t
give her a good answer freely, there would be wisps of leafy jungle scents
tickling his nostrils and he would be compelled to give her a better
one. He’d also be attending the Gotham After Dark party not as the One
True Riddler, but as “Edward the silly man-thing who fetches Poison Ivy
champagne.” So he explained (with reasonable accuracy) about the
party: Gotham After Dark, to benefit the Wayne Foundation. Selina’s
name was mentioned. More than one socialite “picking out a hat.”
It was just the sort of thing that might stir up the vigilantes, so he
decided to lay low for a while—and that’s when Jervis the fusspot showed up
at his door.

“Well, Pammy, I don’t have to tell you,” he concluded with a worldly air.
“You don’t tell Jervis Tetch secrets.”

“No,” she agreed, although she seemed disappointed. “I imagine if
anyone would be taking an interest in Wayne and Selina, it would be
him.” She sniffed dismissively, thinking of her last, disastrous effort
greening Bruce Wayne and the humiliation of being given a Whitman Sampler by
the man who gave Selina diamond cat-pins of his own free will. “‘Picking out
a hat,’ indeed,” she added contemptuously.

Eddie smiled agreeably. He had downplayed the appeal of the party
as a target in itself. He’d stressed only that it was the kind of
thing crimefighters (dim-witted, non-vegetable, male crimefighters) would
think was the sort of event villains would be lining up to attack.
He’d been so focused driving home that point, he didn’t realize the trail of
breadcrumbs he’d left to another topic.

“What secrets,” Ivy asked suddenly.

“Secrets? What secrets?” Eddie asked sharply, his eyes darting around
like a bird.

“You said you disappeared, essentially, because Jervis was hanging
around, presumably interested in this picking out a hat angle (such a silly
man), and ‘you don’t confide your secrets in Jervis Tetch.’ Which I
agree with, entirely. So Edward, what I’m asking is, what is
the secret? What is it you know that none of us do, and what does it have to
do with this Wayne shindig that—Oh.” Her eyes widened and she stopped
midsentence. “Oh my,” she repeated with a coy smile.

Eddie had gone deathly pale. Ivy had guessed. Wayne was dead.
Selina was dead. Selina—poor Selina—what would they do to her?
And all because of him! They’d burn down Wayne Manor, they’d cut Bruce
to ribbons and feed him to Joker’s hyenas, but what would they do to her?

“Picking out a hat indeed,” Ivy drawled. “Is that what they’re
calling it these days.”

“Come again?” Eddie squeaked.

“Oh Edward, you can be such a man.”

“Huh?”

“Going to these ridiculous lengths and all to protect your little kitty
friend’s, heh, reputation—as if she can’t do that perfectly well
herself.”

“Uhhhh,” Eddie stammered, hoping for some clue what Ivy was getting at.

“The stamen pollinates the pistil, Edward, a seed is produced and a new
offspring sprouts forth. It is nature’s way. Only a man would
attempt to create drama from something so simple.”

Eddie swallowed as the awful truth sank in. Ivy had not guessed
the truth. She had guessed something else entirely. And
whatever Selina—or god forbid, Bruce—might have done to him if he had been
responsible for Batman’s secret getting out was absolutely nothing compared
to what might happen now if Bruce—or god forbid, Selina—learned he was
responsible for this.

Jervis was in a panic, an absolute panic. He never expected any
danger in Fat Beat, a store which sold vinyl records.
They sold music CDs and vinyl records. It had nothing to do with
Tweedledum and Tweedledee! The store sold RECORDS.

But Jonathan! Jonathan thought he remembered a scene from Lewis
Carroll with the Tweedles, where Alice “dressed them up in armor so they
could beat each other with bats.” And on that absurd
crumb of misinformed logic, Jonathan thought that was the Eddie clue and he
was searching through Jervis’s bookcase, looking for the passage he thought
he remembered.

He remembered it WRONG. Jervis knew the nursery rhyme by heart, of
course, and he knew what Jonathan would eventually find (if he was so
unlucky that Scarecrow did actually find the scene he was looking for).
It would read:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his nice new
rattle. Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel; Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

A monstrous crow frightening the heroes. Jervis felt that once
Jonathan found that poem and saw those phrases, life as he had known it, was
over.

As far as Poison Ivy was concerned, there were exactly two kinds of
newspapers in the world: the ones that slaughtered trees day after day in
order to have a paper surface on which to vomit their self-important
headlines… and the ones that said nice things about her.

Since she had discovered her new, flattering and respectful coverage in
the Gotham Post, she hadn’t wanted to support the murder of any more trees
by purchasing the Times. But it seemed like this party Eddie was so
worked up about—and the secret it contained—was worth investigating.
So she went down to the newspaper’s office—which was in Times Square, the
most frightfully inorganic part of the City, which left her in a terrible
mood. She located this Hermoine person, who turned out to be a man.
That made everything much simpler. A few whiffs of her special lure
and he was more than happy to leave the office and walk with her back to the
park. She could concentrate so much better there, with all her beloved
plants clustered around to support her.

He confirmed all Eddie had said about the party and a good deal of what
wasn’t said but which Ivy had surmised. This “Hermoine” had it
straight from Bruce’s closest friend in society, a Mrs. Ashton-Larraby, the
very first person in which the happy couple had confided their special news…

Ivy sent Martin-Hermoine-whatever-he-called-himself (silly men and their
cries for attention) on his way, and tried to decide exactly how she felt
about this development.

Catty was knocked up.

Well now. There were those who considered Catwoman a rival to
Poison Ivy’s preeminence in Gotham Rogue circles. Not that Ivy herself
ever considered such a thing, but to the extent that Catwoman ever was
a rival—which she absolutely did not concede—that rival was now removed.
So far, so good. Any plant can bloom more beautifully when it can grow
freely in any direction and not have lesser plants throwing shadows into
their sunlight or distracting the bees with inferior displays of less
colorful blossoms.

That said, the whole situation was not quite as gratifying as Ivy would
have supposed.

There was that Whitman Sampler for one thing. When that snotty son
of his got married, Ivy had crashed the bachelor party and enslaved every
man in the place, including Bruce Wayne. He was her plaything, as
nature intended. And somehow in the intervening years Selina had sunk
her roots so deeply into his psyche that when Ivy greened him a second time,
he could come up with no better expression of his devotion than a five
dollar box of chocolate creams! The man was worth billions! He
gave Catty diamond cat pins from Cartier—and the best he could offer his
goddess was a cardboard box with the tiniest goddamn chocolates anybody ever
saw!

The idea that Selina might have something better than she did, a man who
was hers freely, whose feelings of affection were genuine and not chemically
induced, could only lead to memories of Harvey, and some wise instinct
steered her away from that chain of thoughts. For there was also the
matter of her press.

Ivy was suddenly enjoying exceptionally good press. If Selina was
pregnant—if CATWOMAN was pregnant, what would become of Ivy’s headlines?
Why she’d be buried on page 20 with little naked Jervis playing with his
human skulls. This was not to be borne. Gaia’s Chosen was a
cover girl. She was made for headlines and a picture above the fold,
not a little box below the horoscopes.

Hmm…

The memory of that bachelor party returned.

Not Wayne if the best she could get from him now was a Whitman Sampler,
but the son. What was it he had said that night? “I’m the heir.
I’ll get it all.” In a way, Dick Grayson was as prized a catch as
Bruce Wayne himself. To have him while Selina had Wayne was a perfect
way to assert her own power. How perfect. Selina Kyle pregnant
with Bruce Wayne’s child, page two. Wayne Scion Dick Grayson seen
about town with a mysterious redhead, not his wife, WHO IS THE WOMAN IN
GREEN?… that was the way to a Post cover.

There were days Dr. Bartholomew despaired. Admissions had soared in
the past two weeks, and he began to fear his swelling schedule would soon
prohibit him from giving the critical-risk patients the individual care they
required. Look at this, Patient J on suicide watch and Hugo Strange
confined to a straitjacket. Bartholomew clicked his tongue and blamed
the dire times in which he lived.

He couldn’t know that it wasn’t the spirit of the age, but the party
theme of one Gladys Ashton-Larraby that had brought it all about. Hugo
Strange did not follow the society pages that closely. He would have
heard about the Wayne fundraiser before long, certainly, but he hadn’t heard
at the time of his capture. He didn’t learn of it until getting to
Arkham. He didn’t hear about it until Joker told him. A
rogue-fundraiser to benefit the Wayne Foundation, what a joke,
HAHAHAHAHAAAA!

Hugo suffered a kind of nervous spasm on hearing these words. He
spat, he sputtered, he wheezed, and in his shock, he certainly forgot who he
was talking to. Because he began ranting about Bruce Wayne being
Batman to the man who was not only Batman’s greatest foe, he was a homicidal
maniac and he considered “Brucie” to be his dearest friend in the world.
At any other time, casting such aspersions on Bruce Wayne’s character in
Joker’s hearing would have been a death sentence.

But tonight, Joker listened patiently and kindly, as he would to a child
reciting a poem, a child who was none-too-bright: Yes OF COURSE Bruce would
be going to the party as Batman, that’s the joke.

Joker tried several times to explain. Bruce as Batman, yes exactly,
HAHAHAHA, that’s the joke, Hugly. The best joke ever!

Hugo sputtered all the harder and tried again to make his point clear:
Bruce Wayne was Batman. Didn’t Joker understand? BRUCE
WAYNE WAS BATMAN! BRUCE WAYNE WAS BATMAN! BRUCE WAYNE WAS BATMAN!
Couldn’t he see? Couldn’t they all see? Bruce Wayne was Brucwan,
Brucman, Bratwan… Wasn’t it obvious, why would nobody believe him?

Joker tried twice to calm Hugo down, for really he was foaming at the
mouth like some kind of rabid dog. He understood, he said, really he
did. Brucie would be going to the party as Batman.

And he was going to miss it.

The best joke ever.

The best night in Gotham history.

And he, Brucie’s best friend and Batman’s worst enemy, was going to miss
it.

By the time the orderlies had carried Hugo away (something about
swallowing his tongue), Joker felt he had to lie down.

He was going to miss the party. Ha.

It was really too much to bear.

MEN! People were nothing but an animal infestation screwing up the
wondrous green balance of the planet. Under the general heading of “People,”
men were the worst. And of the animal infestation: People, subheading:
Men, the most objectionable specimen, the very worst of the very worst, was
surely the Post Urbis Scriptor, the Gotham Post reporter.

Ivy knew the Catwoman story could break at any time, and with their
idiotic ‘news cycles,’ she had no time to waste if she was to make sure
her Wayne triumph trumped Catty’s. When day after day passed and
she couldn’t seem to find that miserable Grayson character, she looked for a
substitute. Anyone of approximately the right build and coloring would
do so far as the photographs, grainy-blurred tabloid pictures could be
anyone, after all. She would only have to find whatever little man did
the captioning and tell him it was Dick Grayson. It wasn’t as ideal as
having Grayson himself, but it was only the Post for God’s sake. It’s not like
they actually cared who it was or wasn’t, as long as they thought it would
sell papers. Let’s not forget these were the same fertilizer peddlers
that had her dead and buried a few short weeks ago!

It turned out Victor Fries had a henchman who would make a reasonable
stand-in for Dick Grayson, and it took only a few dollars slipped to the
doorman at the Hudson to make a photographer appear an hour later to “catch
them unawares” as they left together. After they repeated the exercise
at the Carlyle, The Hyatt, and the Washington Square Hotel, Ivy felt the
seeds were well-sown. She was ready for the harvest. She
contacted a Gotham Post reporter and found him quite as responsive as
Martin/Hermoine had been to her suggestion of a walk in the park.

But then, somehow, it all went wrong. Ivy couldn’t tell if it was a
reaction to the pheromones or if he was just that stupid, but this
idiot of a man managed to mess up EVERYTHING. Dick Grayson he could
manage to remember. She had to spell the name twice, but he took it
down. But then he latched on to her first description of herself as “a
mysterious redhead.” He simply could not grasp that this was to be the
headline, the hook, the honeyed fragrance, if you will, drawing all the bees
in to pollinate the flower, GETTING THE IDIOT LEMMINGS TO BUY HIS MISERABLE
NEWSPAPER! But once that was accomplished, he was supposed to reveal
her identity inside. She couldn’t make him understand it was to be
Dick Grayson enthralled by Poison Ivy—not Dick Grayson hopping into
beddies with some no-name redhead!

She was so frustrated, she figured she’d better find a different Post
employee to get her message through. But she was terribly concerned
about these deadlines and news cycles. She did not want Selina’s story
to break before hers. So, while she had this moron in her thrall, she
asked when they were planning to break the story about Catwoman being
pregnant.

Only four men had ever snapped out of a pheromone fog spontaneously:
Batman, Two-Face, Dick Grayson—and now this sniveling non-entity from the
Gotham Post. Ivy saw it, the sudden jolt behind his eyes as some part
of his mind grabbed onto an unexpected thought like the third rail of the
subway and a sizzling charge of live voltage fried all the delicate
ecstasies of pheromone-induced bliss.

“Did you say Catwoman is pregnant?” the insect asked with a crazed gleam
in his eye.

Ivy denied saying any such thing.

“Pregnant. Catwoman,” he repeated, as if she’d confirmed it.
It might have been her imagination, but that crazed gleam in his eye was
starting to look like a dollar sign.

“No, what I meant—” she began.

“Is there a lemonade stand around here? I smell lemon,” he announced.

Ivy paused and reminded herself she was dealing with an idiot—an idiot
with the attention span of a hummingbird, apparently. She smiled
pleasantly, escorted him to the nearest pretzel stand, and bought him a can
of Fresca. She waited patiently while he drank it. Then, when
she figured enough time had passed, she greened him again, very subtly,
suggested he forget the whole thing, and sent him home.

Then she wondered if it might not be a good time to visit the Tropical
Botanical Garden on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Selina was having a lovely dream. A yacht was moored on a
Mediterranean island, surrounded by shimmering blue-green seas. On
that yacht was a safe with a spectacular treasure. Between her and it,
a magnificently challenging security net. She dove from a speedboat
and swam to an internal dock, cut through steel bars—timing her efforts
purrfectly so as not to be seen by the surveillance camera or patrolling
guards. From the dock, she drilled through a steel door leading into a
corridor, found the surveillance monitors, and rewired them to show a fake
video loop. Finally, she boarded the yacht and made her way to the onboard
art gallery, keeping to the perimeter so as to avoid the pressure-sensitive
floor. She disabled the floor sensor with an access key, bypassed a
tank of piranha, and finally reached the Picasso—a fake—a decoy. She
removed this to reveal a safe, cracked it swiftly, and opened it to reveal a
glittering mound of perfect pink sapphires. A gloved hand slid across
her abs, while that deep, ominous voice growled in her ear that those jewels
didn’t belong to her.

She turned, letting her lips hover nearly in contact with his until he
grunted against them. They fought, in agonizing slow motion, bodies
grinding against each other… until something felt wrong. His cape, she
had scrunched a wad of his cape in her hand, but rather than the heavy
fabric it was thin, smooth silk. She opened her eyes and found she was
scrunching a handful of bedsheet.

She purred—which brought a satisfied grunty snore from Bruce who lay
beside her. She kissed her finger and touched it to his cheek, then
whispered “We made it, handsome.”

They had. It was the day of the party and they had made it.
Joker was in Arkham. Hugo Strange, Killer Croc, Mr. Freeze, Catman,
Ventriloquist, Magpie, Maxie Zeus, Roxy Rocket, Deadshot, Killer Moth,
Firefly, Film Freak, Dr. Death, Clock King, The Spook, The Werewolf, the
Trigger Twins, Eraser, DoubleX, Greenface, Calendar Man, Double Dare, Crazy
Quilt, Zodiac Master, Dr. Phosphorus, Kite Man, Black Spider, Captain
Stingaree, Cluemaster, on and on. It was astonishing, the number of
rogues the Batclan had rounded up in the past weeks. Bruce, of course,
would only see the ones still at large: Riddler, Ivy, Hatter and Scarecrow.

But even Bruce had relaxed a little once Joker was out of the picture.
Tonight, they would make a token appearance at the party, not in costume,
Bruce had declared, which fit in perfectly with her plan. She
would wear her Dior, repaired from the Catman fiasco at the MoMA, and the
pink sapphire he’d given her that night to set it off. It would be her
private joke. In that gown, wearing that jewel, she would be attending
as Catwoman in a very private way, one only he would understand.

She blew him a final kiss and got out of bed. She felt wonderful.
It felt like the morning before a heist. She had that same excited
tingle. Déjà vu all over again. And Meow’em if they can’t take a joke.

She slipped into her exercise togs and headed across the hall. When
she returned to the bedroom a half-hour later, ready for her shower, Alfred
had brought the breakfast tray. She stopped to take a glass of orange
juice, and her eyes narrowed as she saw the newspapers folded into the
little side basket that hung off the edge of the tray, the letters ATWO
wrapped around the fold. She set down the glass, shut her eyes and
mouthed a preemptive curse as she unfolded the paper.